Officially closed as of September 16, 2026
Transformation Leaders
Podcast
We've recorded our last show. Thank you to our guests and to everyone who listened. The full archive stays online, so you can still watch every episode.
Meet Your Hosts
Leaders with decades of experience in transformation, technology, and business innovation
David Soden
Transformation Leader & Host
Experienced leader in digital transformation and business innovation with a passion for helping organizations navigate complex change.
Connect on LinkedIn
Shawn Ennis
Technology Executive & Host
Technology executive with extensive experience in driving organizational transformation and building high-performance teams.
Connect on LinkedInAbout the Podcast
David and Shawn sat down with the people doing the hard work of changing how organizations run, and talked through the leadership and technology choices that decide whether a transformation lasts. The show has ended, and every one of those conversations is still here to watch.
Final Episodes
The last conversations we recorded. Every earlier episode is on YouTube.
Making It Happen: High Performance Coaching with James Kawski
Shawn Ennis and David Soden sit down with high performance coach James Kawski to talk about what it takes to live into your highest self. Most people set a standard, hit it, and settle there. James works with the ones who want to keep going past it and make that a habit rather than a one-time push. In this episode, the three get into what high performance coaching actually involves, why so much potential goes unused, and what it takes to close the gap between who you are now and who you could be. They talk about the difference between motivation and standards, and about the daily work of turning intention into something that shows up in your calendar. If you have been circling a bigger version of your life without moving toward it, start here. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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Protect Your Innovation with AI: Patents for Founders | Greg Carson
AI made it cheap to build almost anything. It also made it cheap to copy what you build. So how does a founder actually protect an innovation now, and where can AI genuinely help? In this episode, Shawn Ennis sits down with patent attorney Greg Carson of Carson Patents to walk the path from an idea to an issued patent as a series of go/no-go gates: what is worth protecting, how to judge novelty (it runs both ways), how to document an invention, why filing a provisional before you launch or demo is the key early move, and the one place AI drafting quietly goes wrong. The throughline: AI has lowered the bar to the front of the patent process, but a human attorney is still non-negotiable at the core. GUEST Greg Carson, USPTO-registered patent attorney, engineer, and CEO of Carson Patents. https://carsonpatents.com HOST Shawn Ennis, Founder & CEO of Citus Technologies. https://citus.cloud CHAPTERS 00:00 AI made building cheap, and copying cheap 00:00 Why "patents are for big companies" expired 00:00 Gate 1 — Should you protect it at all? 00:00 Gate 2 — Novelty runs both ways 00:00 Gate 3 — Documenting the invention 00:00 Gate 4 — File a provisional before you talk 00:00 Gate 5 — Claims, and where AI reaches its limit 00:00 Gate 6 — Prosecution, and why going it alone hurts 00:00 The honest counterpoint: a patent is not a business 00:00 Where this leaves founders (Replace the 00:00 markers once the episode is edited.) RESOURCES Carson Patents: https://carsonpatents.com Citus Technologies: https://citus.cloud Companion paper, "Protect Your Innovation with AI," from Citus Technologies. Subscribe to the Transformation Leaders Podcast for conversations with the people rethinking how work, technology, and law come together. #Patents #Startups #Founders #AI #IntellectualProperty #PatentLaw #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #TransformationLeaders 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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The AI Divide: What Races to 0, What Keeps Its Moat — Yuri Kleban, Google
The AI Divide: What Races to 0, What Keeps Its Moat — Yuri Kleban, Google
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The 144× Mistake — Why Your AI Bill Exploded and Nobody Decided It Should
An FAQ-level question routes to a $105 reasoning engine when a $0.73 model would've answered it just as well. Multiply by every employee and every agentic loop, and you get the 2026 headlines: Uber burning its entire annual AI budget by April, a single enterprise's $500M monthly bill, Microsoft killing licenses for a whole division. Nobody made those decisions. The default made them. In this episode, [host] sits down with Taren Patterson — Chief Architect at SemaCore.AI, first-principles design leader with 30+ years bringing hyperscale software and hardware-accelerated products to market, and the architect behind SemaCore's Hero, a business control plane for AI discovery and agentic commerce. We get into: - The 144× spread — why the same token costs two orders of magnitude more depending only on where you send it - How "unmanaged tokens" became a line item that rivals headcount - Why the interface, not the model, is quietly making your cost decisions - What a control plane for agentic commerce actually does about it - Where this goes as agents start transacting on your behalf This one's for anyone who's looked at an AI invoice lately and couldn't explain the number. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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Work is Safe, Business Isnt
Everyone's asking whether AI will take the jobs. Shawn Ennis and Chris Tutas think that's the wrong question. The trades are safe. Nobody is automating a couch up three flights of stairs, or a lawn, or a leaking pipe. But the business built on top of that work — the quoting, the scheduling, the follow-up, the reputation, the partnerships — is wide open. And the threat isn't a robot. It's the operator down the road who figured it out first. In this episode, Shawn and Chris take that idea across two worlds that look nothing alike and turn out to run on the same rule. Chris has spent his career watching incumbents get disrupted — his line is that you can't out-restructure the competition, you have to out-build them. Shawn has been putting that to work in the least glamorous corners of business: movers, lawn care companies, property managers — the "sweaty startups" that make up most of the economy and get told they're immune to all of this. They're not immune. They're the ones with the most to gain. We get into: - Why "AI-proof" is a trap — the work is safe, the business isn't - Restructuring vs. reinvention: why cutting your way to competitive never beats a company built for speed - The internet already ran this play — who won, and why it wasn't the tech companies - The AI-cost reckoning nobody budgeted for - Where augmentation creates a real edge, and where "just replace the humans" quietly falls apart - What an owner-operator can actually do about it on Monday morning This one's for anyone running, advising, or investing in a business that's about to learn its industry moves faster than its org chart — whether that business has ten thousand employees or one truck. Read the white paper this conversation is built on: https://www.kinetic-tricks.ai/the-work-is-safe-the-business-isnt/ — Chris Tutas — [CEO], Fortress Tech Advisors Connect: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-tutas-9809b313/L] Transformation Leaders Podcast, hosted by David Soden and Shawn Ennis — candid conversations with the leaders driving change in business and technology. New episodes: youtube.com/@TransformationLeadersPodcast Listen & connect: transformationleaderspodcast.com #DigitalTransformation #AI #Leadership #SmallBusiness #Telecom 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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Leadership, Psychological Safety, and the Mask 85% of Executives Wear | Dr. Lance Parker
In this episode of the Transformation Leaders Podcast, Shawn and David down with Dr. Lance Parker, author of the upcoming book The Road to Leadership, to get into why so many leaders quietly hold their people back, and what it costs the whole organization. Lance walks through his "psychological paradox loop," the internal wounds and defensive masks that push leaders toward control and micromanagement, and the external toolkit that pulls them back toward psychological safety: emotional regulation, boundaries, and reframing conflict as something healthy instead of a threat. He shares the anonymous staff survey that stopped one "successful" executive cold when he saw how his own team actually saw him, and makes the case that success is not the same as a sustainable culture. The conversation gets pointed on AI. Managers who can't grow themselves can't help their people grow with new tools, so they reach for AI to replace headcount instead, and the adoption stalls. David and Sean add hard-won takes from the field: share the credit, own the blame, and know that skip-level meetings will expose a manager who hasn't been talking to their people 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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5G's Missing Piece: Why Telcos Spent Trillions and Can't Sell It
The Transformation Leaders Podcast with David Soden and Sean Ennis breaks down the problems slowing modern business and hands you the fix. This week, Sean unpacks why 5G never delivered on its promise: telcos poured trillions into hardware that can spin up short-lived "ephemeral" services, but their 20-year-old OSS/BSS software can't provision, monitor, bill, or track any of it. Using a live BT drone-surveillance demo at a Cape Canaveral shipping port, he shows how dynamic topology, real-time geospatial views, five-second service creation, and instant billing close a $127 billion gap, and why the telcos that don't adapt become acquisition targets. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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Why your pipeline is lumpy, and the compounding fix
The Transformation Leaders Podcast, hosted by David Soden and Sean Ennis, talks through leadership, AI, and change every Wednesday. This episode goes back to basics on sales: Sean argues most teams chase a quarterly revenue number instead of building a pipeline that compounds like interest, which burns out reps and turns every 90 days into a company reboot. He makes the case that cold email blasts and newsletters have stopped working, that authenticity and a growing network are now the whole game, and that AI should act as a Tony Stark suit keeping a human in the loop rather than a bot that emails customers on its own. Along the way he lays out his Kinetic Tricks platform (Aria and Sage), which runs off a $300-a-month cloud VPS, listens to your email, CRM, and LinkedIn, and drafts 10 to 15 outreach emails a morning that you approve in 15 minutes. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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Why your web traffic is about to stop & what you need to do now!
Join us for this audio podcast and special web alert. It covers critical, time-sensitive information you need to know and what to do to prepare. It'll be the best 20 minutes you spend this year. Please share it with colleagues and friends. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5027008777420800
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